Why Can-Am thunder still echoes all these years later

Caught in a bad dream. Wedged in an angular bathtub. Its metal thrilled and in my helmet was a heavy throb. I glimpsed a white needle fluttering: 64, 66, 68. Six-eight in third is 158mph.

It was time to wake up.

The vibration cut off. An instant of calm. Then a great hammer struck my spine, slamming my head back. I forced it down, and stared at the long black roadway between the orange wheel bulges. It was rushing like some demonic torrent frantic to enter the gates of hell. Small markings – stains, patches, pebbles – appeared as flickers and were gone like dust on a cine film. There was no longer any sensation of speed. We were going too fast.

This fantasy had gone too far.

A bridge flashed overhead like an aircraft’s shadow. The wide straight kinked to the left. Still absolutely on full bore the McLaren bent into it. The world tilted on edge. To hold myself away from the driver’s arms I had to strain every tendon. Just ahead the world ended in a boilerplate wall. The last time I saw the tachometer it had been showing 6600. That had been 184mph, but Peter Revson’s foot had been hard down ever since. I couldn’t look at it now. My eyes were stuck on that wall.

I really wanted to wake up.

‘RIDING WITH REVVIE’. That’s what I titled a story for Autosport in 1971. I wanted to tell my fellow fans about the five best minutes of my five decades of life as a motor racing nomad.

I hoped to bring them along as I wriggled in next to America’s Peter Revson, new champion of the Can-Am series, as he booted his mighty McLaren-Chevy M8F around Riverside International Raceway at full racing noise.

The British machine with its American-made 8.3-litre, big-block aluminium V8 was a 750-something horsepower booster rocket that propelled me into an otherworldly realm of power, acceleration and velocity that I’d devotedly studied for years, but had not personally experienced.

Honestly, the reality was beyond my imagining. It was like riding an insane rodeo bull, I wrote.

Of all the reasons I loved the old Canadian-American Challenge Cup Series and its stupendously powerful, wildly innovative, effectively unrestricted cars, that incredible experience thrust one advantage straight to the top: these superfast sports-racers had room for me to go along!

Lyons’s Riding with Revvie piece appeared in the 25 November 1971 edition of Autosport

Photo by: Pete Lyons

‘No rules’ racing: Can-Am’s noble experiment

Simplest way to understand Can-Am rules? The engine limit was a minimum – nothing under 2.5 litres allowed. Turbines were out too, but your piston engine restriction was whatever you could squeeze between the wheels. Want additional engines? One Chaparral appeared with two. It proved a genuine frontrunner, at least when both kept running. An even more ambitious builder tried four, although it never reached a Can-Am grid. The series encouraged the wildest experiments.

The whole car was treated with similar leniency. Tyre and wheel dimensions, chassis configuration, body shape, aerodynamic devices, construction materials, fuel capacity, minimum weight – the discouraging reams of restrictions weighing down most rulebooks were largely absent.

What was a Can-Am car, then? Essentially something the organisers could recognise as a sportscar. Cover the wheels, provide two seats and doors, satisfy the modest safety requirements of the period, and get that hammer down.

Whether or not the founders of this new professional series fully intended to create almost completely unregulated racing machines I don’t know, but that’s what they had been working with for years. The Can-Am’s roots grew out of America’s fascination for hot rodding. Specials building, it’s called elsewhere. In either case, dropping big engines into little cars and trying them out on the track honours the ingenuity that created the automobile in the first place – and makes for a giddy good time.

My first Can-Am, round two of the inaugural 1966 season, intoxicated me: not only the sounds and speed, but especially the latest Chaparrals’ space-age technology

My first Can-Am, round two of the inaugural 1966 season, intoxicated me: not only the sounds and speed, but especially the latest Chaparrals’ space-age technology. The 2E model was a conceptual breakthrough. Its driver-adjustable aerodynamics both front and rear, along with its side-mounted engine coolers, first showed us features that exist in Formula 1 today.

In subsequent years, when Autosport bestowed on me the incredible opportunity to follow the whole series, on my long drives back-and-forth across the continent I would be thinking, “I really could see something completely new next time”.

Can-Am was a richly cacophonous cornucopia of creativity. In 1966, local makes included not only Chaparral, but also Chinook, Genie, McKee, Wolverine and many others. From across the Great Water came the likes of Cooper, Lola and McLaren, made-in-Britain chassis stuffed full with Detroit firepower. ‘Big Bangers’ they were known to the mad-keen British public.

That first year’s six-race series presented 19 separate makes of car. They were the real stars of the show, but we also saw star drivers, not only from American road racing, but Indianapolis and sometimes NASCAR as well. World-renowned names from F1 also came, thanks to the clever calendar.

Chaparral 2E pioneered futuristic aero tech in 1966, here at Bridgehampton, New York – which is now a golf course!

Photo by: Pete Lyons

To offer F1 drivers something lucrative to do between world championship weekends, Can-Am’s six dates were slotted conveniently around the autumn’s Canadian, United States and Mexican Grands Prix. At a time when European starting and prize money could be decidedly thin, driving for dollars in the Colonies had irresistible appeal.

So the Can-Am was alluring enough, but then a car polish company showed up with serious prize money. Along with an eye-catching shiny blimp of a trophy that floated above a magnetised base.

The Johnson Wax Can-Am is thought to be motorsport’s first fully sponsored racing series. To lend the enterprise some gravitas, the company hired the retired Stirling Moss to serve as ‘Can-Am Commissioner’. To his credit, the future Sir Stirling energetically carried out his promotional duties rather than just lending his name to it.

Open with a bang

Can-Am’s first race, 60 years ago this September, mustered over 40 cars to Quebec’s Le Circuit, the swoopy miniature Nurburgring at Mont Tremblant/Saint-Jovite. Thirty-four made the grid for a 198.75-mile, non-stop race.

It was a scorcher from flagfall. Starting from pole on the three-wide front row, John Surtees booted his Lola-Chevy T70 into the lead. But outside front row starter Chris Amon shouldered his McLaren-Chevy M1B ahead through the long, diving/rising right-hand first turn.

The New Zealand youngster’s moment of glory only lasted a couple of corners. He ran off the road. At the end of the lap he stopped to have his sticking throttles cleared and his damaged nose spoiler torn off.

That left team boss Bruce McLaren to sink his M1B’s teeth into the T70’s tail, and he would not let go. When John once missed a shift, Bruce scuttled by. Only moments later, the Lola came through lapped traffic ahead again. Surtees held on this time, but so did McLaren.

This is how Don Grey described the excitement in Sports Car Graphic: “McLaren lay glued to the Lola’s exhaust pipes, ducking, weaving, and bobbing in an attempt to pass. But Surtees matched him thrust for thrust and parry for parry. It was a classic duel of two great masters, but behind them a younger master completely upstaged them with a solo performance that was the highlight of the entire race.”

Surtees won inaugural championship in classically beautiful Lola T70 propelled by 5.9-litre Chevrolet V8

Photo by: Pete Lyons

Amon’s pitstop had cost over a lap, but he charged out as if his contract were at stake – and as if the M1B didn’t need that front spoiler after all. “Amon put on the greatest display of driving that Le Circuit’s fans had ever seen,” declared Bob McGregor in Autosport.

As SCG’s Grey detailed it: “Tyres screaming on the knife-edge of adhesion and running every lap below the previous record, Amon sliced his way through the field with ruthless precision.” The young Kiwi made up 48 seconds in 53 laps, whereupon he found his road full of the sister M1B and the wide T70. All three happened to be painted red. It must have been quite a sight.

Bruce waved his team-mate by to see if he could help with the Lola problem. Surtees was too crafty to let that happen, but the youngster was too full of fire to give up, and on the 71st lap, just four from the finish, Amon clocked a new record time that bettered Surtees’s pole lap by over a second. But he had to watch Britain’s many-time motorcycle and F1 world champion take the flag first.

Round two ran 199.5 miles over sinuous, bumpy Bridgehampton in the sand hills of New York’s Long Island. As in Quebec, new records were posted for speed and spectacle. This grid held 35 starters.

Just four laps from the finish, Amon clocked a new record time that bettered Surtees’s pole lap by over a second

Here the Chaparral 2Es debuted, and what an entrance they made. Jim Hall proved that his high, suspension-mounted ‘flipper’ wings worked by taking pole, 0.3s ahead of Dan Gurney’s dark blue, Ford-engined T70. Amon, McLaren and Surtees came next, all tied at 0.2s behind Dan.